The Iraq That Chalabi Left Behind

ERBIL, Iraq — On the rare occasion Ahmed Chalabi consented to an interview in the last couple of years, you first had to listen to a recitation of the list of U.S. and U.N. officials who had betrayed him and stood in his way. Chalabi had an encyclopedic memory. It was a long list. Publicly, he always absolved himself of responsibility for the flawed intelligence that led the US to war. Privately, his friends say, he had begun to worry that Iraq would not survive.

That was Chalabi. He was an Iraqi patriot who launched a decade-long campaign in Washington to get the Americans to oust Saddam Hussein and then arrange things so that he could take over. For a brief, fatal moment in history, Chalabi finally found—in George W. Bush and Co.—American officials eager to sign on to his claims of weapons of mass destruction and his program.

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But by the end no one did any longer. Chalabi’s life, ended this week by a heart attack at age 71, was a story of a brilliant but flawed political player whose dream of a modern, unified Iraq seemed to disintegrate before his eyes.

When U.S. officials turned on Chalabi after it became clear he had oversold the supposed connection between Saddam and WMD and he turned on them too, he then turned to the Iranians. But they too were wary. “He was close to the Americans–he switched sides, so he lost the trust of the Americans and he could never regain the full confidence of the Iranians either, even though they liked him,” said a former senior Iraqi official. “It’s a lesson in politics for all of us—you can’t switch sides too many times.”

And in other ways, Chalabi’s death on Nov. 3 marks the passing of the idea of an integrated Iraq that, despite often playing politics with his fellow Shias, he believed in passionately. Iraq and its Shia-led government are now battling not only Sunni Islamic State fighters but the widening sectarian and ethnic divisions threatening to tear the country apart. “He understood what a new Iraq should be like and he was playing an important modernizing factor among the Shias,” said Hiwa Osman, who served as spokesman for former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani. “This won’t exist anymore. … I think he was someone we did not feel the importance of until he disappeared. ... He didn’t really care about Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Arabs. He believed in the Iraqi identity.”

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Such was Chalabi’s talent for intrigue that the stories about him went on after his death, as Iraqis speculated that he could not possibly have died from anything as mundane as a heart attack. As a parade of Iraqi and Western politicians paid their condolences in Baghdad, local newspapers insisted he must have been poisoned as he was about to release files linking senior political figures to major corruption.

For his Iraqi colleagues, it’s difficult to imagine a political landscape without the man who made that landscape possible. And while neither Iraq nor his dreams of leading the country turned out the way he’d planned, the man described as both brilliant and brilliantly flawed hadn’t yet given up on either.

“Only death could stop the political ambitions of Ahmed Chalabi,” said a former U.S. official who dealt with him extensively.

Outside Iraq, the U.S.-educated Chalabi was demonized as the man who duped the U.S. government into going to war by dangling dubious information about weapons of mass destruction. It was a charge he always, sometimes surreally, denied.

Most Iraqis were initially grateful for the help in toppling Saddam. The decade-long slide into chaos was the problem.

His political baggage included CIA funding for the Iraqi opposition he rallied and a string of corruption charges in the U.S. and Jordan–charges he denied. From a prominent family with centuries of history in prominent positions, he was too elitist to ever court or obtain much popular support.

Did he regret his role in the war? Not publicly. In a rare interview last year, as his name was again floated as prime minister, he worried that Iraq was disintegrating—but he told me it was the lingering U.S. occupation, and not the invasion, that destroyed the country.

He was more candid with his allies in the former opposition.

“I could see in latter years a lot of soul-searching by him about what went wrong ,” said former Kurdish Prime Minister Barham Salih, who got to know Chalabi when they were both in Erbil in the 1990s. “I could see that guy who worked his butt off to get rid of Saddam Hussein only to see things get as bad as they did. He was disappointed.”

As a CNN journalist based in Iraq before the war, I’d covered Chalabi in his transformation from an opposition figure to his triumphant re-entry from exile to his role in an emerging government. As Iraq re-invented itself, so too did Ahmed Chalabi, or at least he repackaged himself. A U.S.-educated, secular Shia from an aristocratic Baghdad family, he promoted the idea of al-Bait al-Shia—the Shia home—a voting bloc to bring together disparate factions. And he courted the Iranians, an essential player in the new Iraq.